You have no idea how many time I watched that when I first saw it. I love his delicate little wave. He looks either really effeminate or super proper and named Rupert or something. Perhaps he is both. In any event is is basically the best bear.

You have no idea how many time I watched that when I first saw it. I love his delicate little wave. He looks either really effeminate or super proper and named Rupert or something. Perhaps he is both. In any event is is basically the best bear.

That bear actually made The Today Show and I saw a segment about him. It wasn't a one off thing, he lives on a farm or something somewhere and learned to wave from all the people who would wave at him. People go there now specifically to get a wave from him.

Your goal here is to act in such a way as to allow the bear to identify you, but to also let it know that you are no threat. Speak calmly so that it knows you are a human (their eyesight is quite poor). They will often quickly give ground to you once they identify you as human. If the situation permits, back away slowly, keeping a close eye on the bear. Otherwise, you may wish to detour around the bear, but in this case, detour upwind so that the bear can get your scent. Keep talking calmly. Waving your arms may help it identify you as a human.

If anyone else had posted that first video, I wouldn't have watched it because I was sure it was going to end with the bear pulling a Timothy Treadwell on his trainer. JuliaA wouldn't do that to me, though.

I saw this on the news last night, and apparently the bear said hi to them - the man showed a little cut on his leg. Don't know if it was a bite or a swipe with the paw, but the bear introduced himself.

That group of four are all grizzlies! A mom and three young'uns. The big hump and the dished face are dead giveaways. You can see how much bigger the mom is than the couple of black bears that come by. The immature griz are as big as full grown blacks.

iirc lack of maternal interest was not the issue. cubs were born sick and mom was eating them (as is the way in the wild). sad for everyone, mama included, and glad this one gets modern health care a new lease on life. sometimes people do good things, even if zoos are bad.

grizzly got really rich dabbling in record producing in the '70s and now is just enjoying his mansion in the hollywood hills. he doesn't need to go fishing anymore—he has a few fridges full of sustainably farmed alaskan salmon—but sometimes does just for old time's sake.

Photos of the day: Sulo Karjalainen, known to many as the “bearman” is affectionately licked by one of his bears, in Kuusamo, Finland. The 73-year-old runs Kuusamo Large Carnivore Centre with his brother Jalo, which has been home to more than 20 orphaned brown bears. Photograph: Pasi Jantti/Barcroft Media

Someone needs to have a movie night with this dude and screen Grizzly Man.

but be warned it's painful. he was apparently orphaned and wandered onto a family farm where he was taken in and seemed quite happy. but since brown bear cubs grow into brown bears, he was taken away. first to a concrete shelter and eventually to a sanctuary where he died under mysterious circumstances

I think those are videos from some kind of nature park, and these bears probably encounter a couple hundred cars per day doing the exact same thing. I wouldn't think it would be a hard behavior to pick up on.

no, i mean that in the first set they mimic the side-to-side style wave of the human, and in the last one the bear mimics the up-and-down style wave of the human. they recognize different waving styles.

Bear cults survived throughout Europe into the 12th century, and they were based on the belief that their members were ancestrally related to bears and could take on a visibly ursine nature in ritual circumstances. These traditions were broken up by force by the late middle ages, and now, today, 'western' human beings think of themselves as existing across a vast ontological gap from other animal species, and regard non-western claims of trans-species identity as vestiges of comically unscientific, primitive ways of apprehending the world (poets still sometimes return to these ways, but when they do we assume they are just being poets). But this prejudice is the result of a distinct local history: the same local history that for so long insisted on an ethnographically anomalous binary gender distinction between male and female.

love that video. my mother's tiny papillon once chased off a much larger bear than that in colorado. im attached to the dog and she emailed me to say that he ran after a bear and was presumed dead. 10 minutes later he came back perfectly fine, bear to be seen.

saw a couple of bears in the wild for the first time ever and inevitably thought of this thread. here's one of them, just chillin' in a meadow in yosemite:

the other one was a lil' baby bear i saw later in the day but i didn't take pictures of because a) i was on a bike and i didn't have my slr with me and b) the prospect of being mauled to death by a hidden mama bear while i tried to take a shitty iphone pic of her adorable progeny seemed too humiliating to risk.

Haha, from the Montana story's comments: The bear could meet the same fate that the young Alaska brown bear did in Dillingham, Alaksa. He was on the edge of town for about 2 weeks prior to our presidents visit foraging for food but suddenly disappeared just before Obama arrived. Justified killing??? Guess so, wouldn't want him to get in the way for our commander in chief's photo op.

His (her?) disability may be why he is hanging out in a human neighborhood, where pickings come a bit easier in the form of garbage, bird feeders, or cat food. Anyway, the bear seems both used to people and very unaggressive.

This reads more like fiction than an article in an encyclopedia. Here we get to hear about not only what many different individuals were thinking, we're even told what the bear is thinking. I'm not sure that this article is even notable. If it is to remain here, the language should be corrected and it should be written like a proper article and not a fictional story. JdeJ 13:07, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

It's important to take the bear's perspective into account. 130.64.137.22 13:55, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

there have been several movies made about the incident. "yellow fangs" from 1990 is a kind of action movie about it, and there's an early-80s film, "the old bear hunter," that's based partly on those events.